Course Redesign in Higher Education: Linking Student Content Creators with Local Non-Profit

Abstract

Higher education faculty are tasked with providing students with unique and creative opportunities to explore real-world exposure and experience. Content creation puts students in the driver’s seat for learning and application of course content. This paper discusses the redesign of a senior-level Business Communications course at a public four-year institution in Hawaii through project-based learning and content creation, linking students with their community. The course redesign provided a creative platform for students to create, collaborate, and share their original work with a local non-profit focused on giving back to the community. Faculty utilized High Impact Practices (HIPS) in the course redesign to fuse creative and collaborative assignments with community-based learning. The utilization of Open Educational Resources (OER) was selected for the course redesign chiefly for its openly licensed format, increasing equity and access to learning materials (Van Allen & Katz, 2020). OER provides zero-cost course content, essential for the underserved student populations hit notably hard during economic dips (Colvard et al., 2018). The course redesign provided a hands-on approach that required students to develop their research and critical thinking skills while allowing for creativity and collaboration with stakeholders. Students created an e-portfolio of content focused on the non-profit’s primary goals. Each portfolio consisted of numerous writing assignments aligned with a theme. The course utilized peer reviews and instructor feedback to revise and rework the e-portfolio in preparation for sharing or publication. The final student portfolios were made available as OER to contribute back to the nonprofit organization and educational community.



Author Information
Leslie Rush, University of Hawaii West Oahu, United States

Paper Information
Conference: BCE2024
Stream: Higher education

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Posted by James Alexander Gordon